A crucial front in the Afghanistan war is the Kandahar region in the southern part of the country. A crucial player in that area is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger half-brother of President Hamid Karzai. He is the chief of the provincial council—which means he essentially runs the place—and he’s long fought off charges that he’s a drug-dealing warlord (even claiming the US Drug Enforcement Agency has cleared him of this accusation, though it hasn’t).

Now, the latest WikiLeaks dump of classified US State Department cables shows that AWK—as he’s called—is in low repute among Americans officials, who nevertheless figure they have no choice but to work with him. In a October 3, 2009, cable to Foggy Bottom reporting on a meeting Frank Ruggiero, the embassy’s senior civilian representative for southern Afghanistan, held with AWK, the US embassy in Kabul wrote, “While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.”